923 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
possession of the popular heart, in every land which yielded 
to the sway of those warrior and hunter races. 
And to this day, wherever a drop is to be found of that 
fierce Northern blood surviving in the people’s veins, there 
you will find, and in no other land, the passion for the 
chase alive and dominant. 
In southern Europe, in the nations which speak the 
soft bastard Latin, in Italy, Spain, Portugal, the shores 
and isles of the Mediterranean, there is no hunter-spirit in 
the people; and even where the chase has been attempted, 
as a regal pastime, by the rulers and the princes of the 
lands, it has fallen dull and ineffectual, a mere mimicry 
and simulacrum of the genuine sport, and no more like 
the real hunts-up, “than I to Hercules.” 
In the Teutonic wolds and woodlands, on the con- 
trary, on the bleak mountain-tops and misty moors of 
Scotia, in the deep green morasses of Hibernia, in the re- 
joiding valleys, over the breezy downs, in the time-honored 
forests of old England, among the perpetual snows of the 
frore and frozen Alps, upon the broad and burnt karroos 
of southern Africa, among Australian gum-trees or Cana- 
dian pine-woods; from the ghauts, from the grand peaks 
of the Himalayas, to the stern flanks of the Rocky Moun- 
tains and the skirts of the American salt desert, how gen- 
uinely, how spontaneously burns the hunter ardor of the 
Norse populations. 
So long as Britain remained provincial, the inhabitants 
having become almost entirely Romanized, during four 
centuries of subjugation, the chase, if it were followed at 
all, was but a desultory, casual and unsystematic pastime ; 
